This was sent to me (from Big Al) from Christopher Booker's Notebook in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph. Obviously copyrighted :--)

"Licentious premises

Stuart Neame, the vice-chairman of England's oldest brewery, Shepherd Neame in Faversham, Kent, has caught out civil servants in a quite shameless piece of figure-fiddling, calculated to promote the Government's plan to transfer pub licensing from magistrates to local councils.

The Home Office knew when it published a White Paper on its proposals in 2000 that they might not be popular. So the central argument it deployed was that, over 10 years, the new scheme would save pubs £1.9 billion.

These figures - as Mr Neame pointed out last month in a letter sent to Kim Howells, a minister at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, which has now taken over pub licensing - are based on an outrageous sleight of hand.

The White Paper claims that current licensing costs to the pubs equate to £4 billion over 10 years, as opposed to £2.1 billion under the new scheme.

This is based on the assumption that licensing costs average between £1,000 and £7,000 a year for each pub. On checking actual costs for the 360 pubs his brewery owns, Mr Neame found that the average figure is actually £100 a year.

The Government's case for the new scheme is thus based on exaggerating the figures by between 10 and 70 times, and a system supposed to save the pubs £1.9 billion will in fact add more than £1 billion to their costs. Hardly surprisingly, more than two-thirds of pubs now oppose the scheme.

Mr Neame is still awaiting an explanation from Mr Howell. And his Secretary of State, Tessa Jowell, owes Parliament an apology for a White Paper that rests its case on such dishonesty."

The URL for it is: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2002%2F09%2F29%2Fnbook29.x ml